Bouyancy

I am absolutely one of those New Year, new beginnings, kind of people. Notebook in hand, you will usually find me making lists of goals, a series of wanted manifestations, and a map towards my spiritual center, a guide to help me return when I am lost.

It’s different this year. No lists, no manifestations, not even a traveling itinerary. I am experiencing an eerie sense of stillness and movement simultaneously. It’s an odd juxtaposition, the less I grasp, cling, and direct - the greater the freedom I experience to receive.  And things are just coming to me, flowing around me, carrying me along in some crazy kind of buoyancy, a leaf cast into waters, floating along eddies, drifting towards shores, released again and again into currents stronger than the impediments attempting to hold me. 

Buoyancy is an upward force exerted by a fluid that opposes the weight of a partially or fully immersed object. For this reason, an object whose average density is greater than that of the fluid in which it is submerged tends to sink. If the object is less dense than the liquid, the force can keep the object afloat. A basic understanding of density states increasing pressure on an object decreases volume and increases density.  

Allowing myself to live without expectation, without control, or judgment, allows for a lessening of pressure. I am able to create, to receive, to experience life more fully - greater volume. There is less mass, I am not so compactly or densely put together now that my grief is dissipating, my rage fading, my hope growing.

I’ll take the wide plain of the leaf, the curve of its edges still reaching up to the sun as it floats effortlessly. I’m done sinking. Lightness appeals to me. Of course there is an element of fear. Floating, being carried, traveling to unknown destinations all require a degree of trust I wasn’t formed with inherently. Living each day with a little mystery can be unsettling. The truth is I don’t ever want to be settled. I like surprises. Riding unseen currents suits me.